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16

Mods / Re: [0.8.1a] Diable Avionics 1.85 (01/07/2017)

« on: July 28, 2017, 12:15:56 PM »

Squish Cat, you did two things wrong. You didn't pilot the Fractus, and you cared that a Vapour died, which means you didn't put Reinforced Bulkheads on it. Just set all your frigates to escort your Fractus, and tell your Frost wings to engage one ship after the other. Put Reinforced Bulkheads on all your frigates so you can recover them and give them crap weapons you don't care about losing. It's not reasonable to expect to never have a ship get blown up in 0.8a, so just put Reinforced Bulkheads on them so you don't lose the hull. D-Mods aren't that terrible.

It wasn't just a Vapor.  It was all of them.  Plus the Draft and the Fractus.  Every single ship.  Every time.  None of them would last longer than it took for me to kill a single enemy frigate and it would always end up with me, alone, vs 4 other ships.  And its not just that one fight.  I'm struggling to fight against anything using these ships that I don't overwhelm at least 2 to 1.  I never have had this problem using other mod faction ships or just plain vanilla ships.  At worse I'd occasionally lose one ship and just replace it with a D-Mod like you said and keep going.

A few times I did try to have the Vapors escort the Fractus while ordering the Fractus to strike individual enemy frigates, but that didn't work at all.  The Fractus would just fly straight into the frigates and immediately die.  That thing dies WAY too fast for being a destroyer sized ship, even if it is supposed to be a modified tanker.  No, I didn't pilot the Fractus.  That I didn't consider that as an option was a mistake, absolutely.  I don't usually pilot carrier ships, though, and I've never had a problem just issuing orders to them before.  I never have the skill points necessary to invest into the fighter skills to make carrier ships truly shine.  I put officers with the 3 relevant fighter skills in carrier ships while I always take the 4th fleet wide fighter skill officers can't get.

As far as ships not getting blown up in 8a, that some what true to a certain extent.  Tactics, proper fits/loadouts and issuing orders to your ships can avoid most ship deaths usually.  You will occasionally lose something.  It happens and is unavoidable in the long run, yes.  A ship loss is generally nothing to worry about, especially if its just a frigate.  But again, its not just a single frigate I was losing.  Its everything.  I either win out right due to overwhelming numbers, or I lose everything.  There doesn't seem to be any in between.  Something just feels... off.

Vapors feel like they're way too fragile if they are supposed to be the main combat frigate of the faction.  It doesn't feel like they're trading that fragility for offensive power IMO, and their speed is still comparable to other frigates.  I could easily pass the Vapor's fragility off if their main role was that of an interceptor frigate, but apparently its not.  This means that Diable lacks a proper combat frigate?

What is really making me question these ships is the fact I was able to win with a hastily slapped together D-Mod Lasher that wasn't even optimally fit 2 vs 4.  Something I didn't even struggle to do. I couldn't even do this using a Vapor 5 vs 4 before.  Everything would end up getting wiped out.  A problem I am still having issues with even now with every other encounter.

The Vapor IS the work horse frigate of Diable. If you want a player frigate, then look for a Versant. The Draft is more a support frigate, cheap to field but can pack a punch with four Thunderbolts or annoy with mico missiles. Personally, I'd field a Calm ASAP. It's cheap for a combat destroyer and would give your frigates something to base around.
For your other question, you have to look at the weapon_data.csv file. It's located Starsector>mods>(whatever mod name)>data>weapons then look for the weapon_data.csv file. It lists all the stats of the weapons for the mod.

I'll look for a Versant or a Calm and see if this doesn't change things for me.  Hopefully they'll be more durable, or at least provide a better experience than I have been having.

do you try 2 frost 1 strife? strife have huge burst damage and annihilate ship with low armor but you need something to tie up enemy like with blizzaia so they can use their system

Usually on two slot carriers, I tend to double up their fighters rather than split them like that.  That way if I need a specific role covered, I have it covered on a single carrier.  Its the 3 slot carriers and above where I mix and match the fighters for a more general purpose role.  That said, no, I haven't actually tried this.  I should try testing this with a Fractus to see if that doesn't improve the situation any.  I am worried the Strife will be too fat and slow to catch a frigate, though.  A single LPC of Frosts won't be enough to take down a frigate on their own if the Strife is never able to catch up.

Again, sorry if any of this at all came out rantish or too critical.  I am just trying to figure out why everything is going so wrong and where I can fix or improve things with this faction, or if maybe Diable ships just aren't for me.  Certainly not their fighters.  I love the fighters.  They kick ass.  The fighters have already proven themselves to me.

17

Mods / Re: [0.8.1a] Diable Avionics 1.85 (01/07/2017)

« on: July 28, 2017, 12:50:29 AM »

Well, the Fractus isn't a combat ship. It's a converted tanker and can't take any beating really. And using Frost on it that early in the game is probably not the best choice: those wanzers are anti-fighters with a special attack against large ships. They are pretty much a meat-shield for large battles but useless against frigates: any other Wanzer wing would do better. When outnumbering the enemy, Drafts are nearly un-killable thanks to their system, your's should be able to distract a couple of enemies for you to sneak some shots in their back. Vapors are bloody fast and just as fragile as you can expect. They must either have strong burst weapons to flux-lock the enemy, or very long range to never get into danger.

The gist of the faction is to have missiles and Wanzers distract and whittle down the enemy while your Advanced Avionics hullmods charge up, and then go in for the kill with enhanced stats. Their ships are fragile despite a reasonable amount of firepower: they really need to be escorted by Wanzers and to support them.


I also have a couple of improvements in a wip patch, but I just don't have any free time to finish it for release these days...

I see.  So basically I chose all the wrong ships and fighters for what I am doing.  I did not bring the right tools for the job.  Yep, sounds like that be the problem.  So given that I am trying to build up via privateering Hegemony and Tri-Tachyon's merchant fleets, what Diable ships (and fighters) do you recommend I use for this?  Given that Vapors are fragile, but fast, they look like they'd be perfect for chasing down fleeing ships rather than taking things head on.  What is the work horse offense frigate for Diable Avionics?

Regarding the Fractus.  See, I thought it was the other way around.  The Tanker was a converted Fractus.  I thought it was supposed to be more durable than it really is like all the other light-carriers.  If the Fractus is a converted Tanker, yeah, now that makes total sense why the Fractus has all of the durability of a freighter.  It technically IS a freighter.  So if the Fractus isn't a combat ship, then it might erroneously have its default AI set to a combat ship.  The thing keeps flying straight into the middle of the front line and getting itself killed.  The other light-carriers I've used don't have this problem and remain well away from the fight while projecting their fighters at things.  This is of course without officers seated in the Fractus.  I haven't found any I like yet.

Also regarding the Frosts.  I had done some tests with Diable fighters before and found Frosts to be all around better.  Time to kill, two Frost Wings have always beat out two Strife's or two Snipers hands down.  The Snipers of course are obviously going to survive longer since they don't run the risk of getting shot down by enemy PD, but they also do not chase target.  Snipers will only hug their carrier, even with the engage order set, so the carrier has to wade into the thick of battle for the Snipers to do anything.  Yeah, eventually the two Strifes will kill its target, but it takes them a LOOOONG time to do so, even against frigates.  Destroyers just shoot down Strifes with their normal weapons because they're so big so they're completely ineffective against them from what I've seen.  Frosts on the other hand are small and fast enough to dodge the big guns from Destroyers, while being numerous enough to overwhelm the PD.  Then they just slice up the destroyer with that blade move which is totally bad ass BTW.  Versus frigates, Strifes just don't have to speed to keep up leaving them very ineffective against anything thats faster than they are.  For me, Frosts have always done the job faster with less hassle because they can stay on target, theres more of them making them less vulnerable to PD focus fire, and they chase.  If one Strife dies, which it usually does, the damage is effectively cut in half.  But if a single Frost dies, there are still three more in play, and generally because there are more fighters, it spreads the PD out against more targets, rather than concentrating the fire onto a single one.  This tends to make the Frosts last longer and project their damage more reliably.

One more question, though this has nothing to do with your mod really.  Since 8a, you're no longer able to look at fighter weapons directly in the fitting screen.  How do you look at the damage and damage type of fighter weapons now?  I have not been able to figure this out.

18

Mods / Re: [0.8.1a] Diable Avionics 1.85 (01/07/2017)

« on: July 27, 2017, 10:29:54 PM »

This will probably be a bit long winded, and hopefully not sound too much like a rant.  My intention isn't to yell at anyone or call anyone else out specifically.  Given what just happened, though, I do feel a little frustrated at the moment, so I apologize in advance if this comes off as rantish or feels like a personal attack against the author of this mod.  It totally isn't meant to be, I swear!

So I decided to do a new faction play through and chose Diable Avionics as I'd never done a faction play through with them.  I have used Diable fighters before, just never their ships.  When I do faction play throughs, I generally try to stick exclusively to that factions ships and weapon systems.  I've always loved the way Diable ships look and the current story behind them is pretty neat.  The Versant is probably my favorite Diable ship looks wise.  The way it transforms is just frigin' sweet.  I'm using Nexrelin and Dynasector of course because yes.  I've never actually flown a Diable ship until last night, though.  Maybe I am doing something horribly wrong and I am just not "getting" these ships, but these ships feel incredibly paper thin and weak to me.  Perhaps this is just how the faction was designed and its supposed to be this way, I don't know, but I am losing even sided fights against things I wouldn't be losing too if I was flying vanilla ships or the other faction ship mods I am using.  It seems to me that unless I out number my enemy at least two to one, I lose.  Very badly.  Completely and utterly.  Going down in flames because you shot your own tail off Indiana Jone's style kind of losing.  Like, I'm losing so bad that I'll kill maybe one ship before all mine are dead.  This is happening in under two minutes as I'm not even going into CR loss by the time this happens.

My current fleet is 3 Vapors (with me flying one), a Draft, and a Fractus using 2 Frost wings.  I managed to build this up by getting super lucky and capturing an Atlas filled with supplies and machinery early in my play through.  It was only being guarded by a single Wolf and Cerberus, which I have to admit took me WAY longer to kill as a solo Vapor than I feel it should have.  The supplies and machinery it was carrying sold for a good 200k to Pirates which allowed me to build up what I have now.

For three hours (what can I say, I'm a stubborn bastard) I was banging my head against a merchant fleet of 2 Lashers, a Wolf and a Brawler guarding a juicy buffalo that might be carrying some Organics that they're keeping in reserve.  They kept completely wiping the floor with me, and I honestly wasn't understanding why.  I out numbered them.  I have a destroyer sized light-carrier that should be deleting at least one frigate right away with its fighters, or at the very least distracting it long enough to turn the fight 5v3.  Instead, the Vapors are getting themselves blown up over and over, and then the Fractus, with its paper thin defenses, was getting wrecked in half a second.  Finally I took a hard look at why the Fractus itself is dying so fast.  In a lot of these fights the Fractus was the first to explode.

After looking at stats and comparing them to other ships, I was beginning to understand why I was having this problem.  Seriously, statistics wise, the Fractus is possibly the weakest light-carrier and probably weakest combat focused destroyer sized ship in existence right now.  Its seriously weaker defensively than quite a few frigates and that shouldn't be happening.  Especially compared to the Vapors, and they're already having trouble as it is!  Even the Shadowyards Sargasso isn't this bad, and the Sargasso is kinda fragile too.  But the Sargasso is at least fast enough to stay out of the fight and let its fighters do the job.  Or maybe this is an AI thing, and the Fractus is considered a combat ship, while the Sargasso a "pure" carrier and avoids direct confrontations entirely.  Either way, the Fractus does not have the defensive capability to deal with front line combat.  I'm not talking about fire power here.  Fire power on carrier type ships comes from their fighters, not their guns.  I'm talking strictly about its ability to survive.  1.1 shield flux damage ratio and only 3500 flux capacity?  Ouch.  That is pretty bad.  Thats what I would expect a freighter to have, not a combat focused ship.  The Vapors are better than this (just barely) and they're frigates!  The Fractus does have decent hull HP and armor, but this isn't enough to save it.  I have to say that the Fractus is a pretty bad carrier.  I noticed someone above made a similar comment about Diable carriers not quite being up to snuff and I'm going to have to agree.  At least in regard to the Fractus, anyway.  The Fractus is a bad ship, and I'm starting to hate the Vapors.  Surprisingly, the Draft tends to out live the other AI controlled ships and ends up one of the last to go down.

So just to prove a point to myself, I stopped chasing that merchant, flew to a close by pirate base.  It was really close by where I had been trying to deal with this merchant fleet.  I grabbed a Lasher (D) that had 3 D-mods on it.  Compromised Engines (because its always Compromised Engines :x), Glitched Sensors, and Faulty Powergrid.  It was the only thing for sale that I could afford and felt was combat worthy.  Put a pair of machine guns (singles, not the duals) and a pair of light mortars,  and a single rack of Hornet missiles.  I hate light mortars, and they only had that one missile rack for sale, so this is what I had to work with.  I chased that same merchant fleet down again (It hadn't gone very far.) to see if I couldn't make this work some how.  I like fighting up hill as a way to challenge myself, so I deployed myself in the Lasher (D) and a single Vapor as a distraction this time around against their 4 frigates.  It was a completely different fight this time.  2 vs 4, I wiped the floor with THEM in under two minutes.  Unfortunately, the Vapor managed to get itself killed 1vs1 with the enemy Brawler mid way into the fight.

So at this point I was just like, whatever.  I loaded my last save to before I bought the Lasher and gave up trying to kill that merchant fleet.  I've been flying around for the last two hours or so trying to find fights that do work for me with what I have, and unfortunately I keep running into the same problems.  Fights where things are even, or I slightly out number my opponents and still losing horribly.  I love the design of the ships and the lore behind this faction, but I really don't know if I can make this work.  These ships just feel too weak to me and I can't seem to get any where doing what I'm doing.  I've never had this problem before while doing an exclusive faction play through using vanilla ships or other mod factions.  Again, maybe the problem is that I don't understand these ships, but I do feel like this faction is on the weak side of things.  Now that I mention it, I honestly can't remember ever having a fight against Diable not being me just steam rolling them.  That is to say that Diable can't be dangerous.  A wave of Diable fighters is very much scary as hell, but more so when I'm the one fielding them.

I want to make this work, but I feel that this isn't going to go well for me in the long run.  Tips?  Tricks?  Anything?  How do YOU get Diable ships to work for you?

19

General Discussion / Re: 8a ECM/ECCM Package - 50% Reduced ECM Effect?

« on: July 27, 2017, 11:09:41 AM »

Get Electronic Warfare 1!  You will not regret it.  It is the best defense against enemy ECM.  (If you are already at level 40 and out of skill points, my condolences.)  Your experience is why I call it #1 perk in the game.

I wish I could answer your question about ECCM though, although it seems someone else just answered that.

Thats unfortunate.  This kinda puts that skill into the "required" category now.  Sadly, I do not have any spare points.  At least not in this play through.

ECCM only affects the ship it is installed on

This kinda makes me wish there were dedicated specialty fleet wide ECCM ships now.  At least for the purposes of countering ECM.  A way to counter ECM without needing to fit every single ship with ECCM or getting the now must have skill to counter this problem.

20

General Discussion / 8a ECM/ECCM Package - 50% Reduced ECM Effect?

« on: July 27, 2017, 09:29:32 AM »

NPC fleets are overflowing with ECM now.  Its gotten to the point where I am now surprised to not be at a constant -20% weapon range thanks to this.  So its time to do something about it.  The ECCM Package hull mod had a 50% reduced ECM effect added to it with the 8a patch.  Does anyone know if the reduced ECM effect is fleet wide, or does that only affect the ship that the ECCM package is installed on?

21

General Discussion / Re: Sooo... Capital ships?

« on: July 26, 2017, 12:21:58 AM »

I hated the Odyssey at first.  If you think of it as a 45 CR deployment ship, it kind of is disappointing, yes.  To me it feels like a 40 CR ship.  Despite that, I've had good success using it. First and foremost, however, its a broadside ship and should be set up like one.  Once you set it up as a broadside ship, it works pretty well.

Spoiler

[close]

As per the screenshot: 2x Autopulse, 2x Typhoon Reaper Launchers (Or Sabot SRM Pods), 1 Guardian PD System (had no idea what else to put here), 1 Pilum LRM Launcher (again, no idea what else to put here), 7x IR Pulse Lasers, 5x Burst PD Lasers, 2x Warthogs OR 2x Claw Fighter Wings. Mods: ITU, Expanded Mags.

Warthogs will help utterly annihilate whatever you're broadsiding once the shields drop.  Claws will help catch and disable annoying frigates so you can blow them away.  Both of these have worked really well in conjunction with this ship and I am not sure which I like better.  They both have their merits.

I've been able to destroy Onslaughts, Paragons, and other ships using this thing.  Though frankly that might not be saying much.  The player already has a distinct advantage against the AI if they know how to exploit mechanics.

I've also seriously been considering just dropping the Pilum Launcher all together, sacrificing some Capacitors (or going back to the cheaper Claws) and putting in an Unstable Injector.

I still think this ship should only cost 40 CR to deploy under its current specs all the same.

22

General Discussion / Re: Questions before I buy

« on: July 22, 2017, 06:14:22 PM »

Everyone else has pretty much covered your questions, but I still strongly go by the ethos of "Seeing is believing."  So allow me to link you a video of the current on going (at the time of this post) AI tournament that should show you roughly how long the bigger ships can last in battle.

Normally you can control a ship and issue orders to your fleet, but this isn't a multiplayer game.  So what the players have done here in this video is set up a system where they submit loadout designs and they're pitted against each other fully under the control of the AI.  Since every other ship in your fleet is controlled by the same AI anyway, its still pretty fun to watch tournaments of these fights.  This fight consists of frigates, destroyers, and cruisers.  No battleships though, but the battleships are much more durable than the cruisers are for comparison's sake.  As you can see, the cruisers are pretty beast as it is, and even though destroyers are getting pummeled by cruisers, they can still take a decent amount of punishment.  Frigates are kinda fragile though, but their main benefit is their speed, not the durability.  Frigates can easily wolf pack larger ships and kill them, though.  Size progression is Frigate -> Destroyer -> Cruiser -> Battleship.  Light carriers are equivalent to Destroyers, Carriers are equivalent to Cruisers, and Supercarriers/Battlecarriers are obviously equivalent to Battleships.



Fighter swarms are also really awesome.  

23

General Discussion / Re: Java Memory Allocation Question - 8 gigs not enough?!

« on: July 22, 2017, 08:36:47 AM »

IIRC the "hammerhead_d_default_D" issue is resolved by doing a clean install - manually deleting everything (after saving off the mods/saves folder etc) and reinstalling. I'm not sure what the root cause is (possibly the installer failing to clean things up properly for Windows reasons) but basically the install is corrupted somehow.

Also, if your save is from 0.8a originally, rather than 0.8.1a, that *may* be a factor - not 100% sure here, was a while since the last time this came up.

This could potentially be related to an issue I've run into several times.  Or maybe its the same issue.  I completely deleted the Starsector folder from my previous install before installing 8.1a.  But this still happens.

Problem is there are times time where I've recovered ships I've lost in a fight (I was piloting them) with zero D-mods on them.  They're recoverable as undamaged ships.  It even says "No lasting damage." when you hover over the recoverable ship in the recovery menu.  They remain a (D) ship but without the D-mods when you recover them, though.  I can't restore them since there aren't actually any D-mods on them.  However, if I end up losing the ship again and it gets recovered with a D-mod on it, I can restore it and it goes back to being a normal ship without the (D) designation at that point.  Functionally, the (D) ships work fine, they just have the messed up looking hull until they're able to finally get restored using the method described previously.  This happens with any ship, not just hammerheads.

Screenshot in spoiler.  This is one of the ships where this recently happened, an Afflictor.  I've been waiting to have it blow up again so I can fix it.  Provided it ends up recoverable that is.

Spoiler

[close]

EDIT: I forgot to mention that I do also have Recover Operations skill maxed out.  The one where recovered ships have fewer D-hull mods.

24

Mods / Re: [0.8.1a] Blackrock Drive Yards v0.9.0 (07.06.2017)

« on: July 20, 2017, 07:08:03 PM »

Are there more recent links to pictures of the Blackrock ships?  All the images have been blocked by Photobucket talking about 3rd party posting.  Even visiting the links directly don't show the ship, but instead the same image complaining about 3rd party posting.

25

General Discussion / Re: Huh

« on: July 17, 2017, 12:51:52 AM »

Behold!  The power of the sun!

I liked those little fighters that spun around and formed a circle around his ship.   

26

General Discussion / Re: Java Memory Allocation Question - 8 gigs not enough?!

« on: July 16, 2017, 07:59:52 PM »

Do you have the min and max set to the same level? That should help. Also, certain mods are heavier than others

Yep, 8g - 8g...

Did you type in 8g or 8192m for the xms/xmx params?  I know technically 8g is supposed to work, but from my personal experience, half the programs that use Java that I've used do not accept the "g" tag as a viable syntax when setting memory limits.  8g ends up being set as 800 megabytes, or some other odd number, for some reason.  However, typing out the full number in megabytes, IE: 8192m has always worked for me.

27

General Discussion / Re: 64-bit Java version 8

« on: April 21, 2017, 03:03:04 PM »

For not going both? File size mostly. The JRE is a big chunk of the total. Planning to switch to 64-bit for the .8.1 release, though. Seems like more people need to install a 64-bit version than would need to install a 32-bit one, if that makes sense.

Thanks for the reply!  I kinda figured it had to be either licensing or file size.

If it helps, it seems only a handful of people who play video games are even using 32-bit operating systems any longer.  This is a screenshot from Steam's hardware survey.

http://imgur.com/a/CQtD8

Seems only 7.17% of Windows users are using a 32-bit exclusive OS, while 100% of the Apple and Linux OSes are 64-bit.  Not saying that Steam is the defacto authority when it comes to this sort of thing, but there will very likely be heavy overlap with Steam users and people who play video games outside of Steam.  The other thing to consider too is that if you're switching over to 64-bit, it might not be a bad idea to up the memory usage in the vmparams to at least 2 gigs.  I think most people are going to have at least 8 gigs of memory now if they play video games.  Just a thought.

28

General Discussion / Re: 64-bit Java version 8

« on: April 21, 2017, 02:36:06 PM »

There were quite a few reports of java 8 outright crashing in native jvm code, so I'd strongly recommend not using it.

Also, since you're here, quick question.  Is there a reason you don't also distribute the game with java 64-bit along side of the 32-bit version?  Licensing, file size, etc?  Or some other reason?  I'm just curious for curiosities sake.

29

General Discussion / Re: 64-bit Java version 8

« on: April 21, 2017, 02:28:31 PM »

FYI there's no problem having many different JREs installed; the Java Control Panel allows you to specify which is the system default
More importantly Starsector doesn't use the system JRE anyway, it uses the one in the starsector\jre folder. (or the one specified in starsector.bat/.sh)

This is good to know.  So installing Java 7 won't overwrite 8, and I'll just need to set which one my computer defaults too outside of Starsector, yes?

30

General Discussion / 64-bit Java version 8

« on: April 21, 2017, 11:29:29 AM »

Looking for someone that has experience to answer a few questions relating to this.

After changing the jre files over to 64-bit Java in the Starsector folder, and set the vmparams file to use 4 gigs, I started the game only to run into an error message that says Starsector only supports version 7 of Java.  There is an option, which I located and changed, to allow any version of Java to be used in the settings.json file.  I currently have Java 8 installed, which is the version I migrated over to Starsector. I need Java 8 for a work related application and am not sure I can install Java 7 without overriding 8.  Starsector started fine and I managed to play a bit of the tutorial, but I was wondering if anyone knows if running Starsector on Java 8 is going to cause any problems.  Warning messages exist for a reason, after all.